The Blitz

The Blitz was a German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941 during World War II. Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe conducted mass air attacks against industrial targets, towns, and cities, beginning with raids on London towards the end of the Battle of Britain. From 7 September 1940, London was systematically bombed for 56 of the 57 ensuing nights, and the Germans also targeted major cities and industrial centers such as Liverpool, Kingston upon Hull, Bristol, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton, Swansea, Birmingham, Belfast, Coventry, Glasgow, Manchester, and Sheffield. 40,000 British civilians were killed and 139,000 injured in the brutal strategic bombing campaign, but the Germans failed to demoralize the British into surrender. By May 1941, the Royal Air Force had deployed night fighters to combat the Luftwaffe's nighttime air superiority, forcing the Germans to abandon their air campaign.

Background
Neither Britain nor Germany bombed enemy cities by night in the early months of the war, though both had used night bombing in World War I. By the end of August 1940 the Luftwaffe seemed to be winning the Battle of Britain, but not fast enough. Autumn gales threatened the safe passage of the invasion barges across the English Channel. The Luftwaffe decided to shift the focus of attack from RAF Fighter Command's airfields to London. Adolf Hitler, who still hoped to bring Winston Churchill to the conference table, had thus far withheld permission to bomb the capital. Now he ordered his forces to make "disruptive attacks on the population and air defenses of major British cities, including London, by day and night."

Both Britain and Germayn had discovered in smaller operations earlier in teh war that their existing types of bomber aircraft could not fight their way to targets without a fighter escort during daytime. It remained to be seen how well their crews' navigational skills and equipment would stand up to the demands of bombing accurately at night.

Campaign
On Saturday, 7 September 1940, the Luftwaffe launched its first major raid on London. The "Blitz", as Germany's bombing campaign became known in Britain, was about to begin. That day 300 aircraft dropped more than 300 tons of bombs on London's docks and the densely packed streets of the East End. The fires they started lit the way for 250 more bombers, which attacked between 8:00 PM and dawn.

London's ordeal
For two months, between 7 September and 12 November, London was spared bombing on only 10 nights. Some 13,000 tons of high explosive and a million incendiaries fell on the city, killing 13,000 people and leaving over 250,000 homeless. The cost to the Luftwaffe was negligible. Only a handful of the RAF's night fighters were fitted with a primitive form of airborne radar. Nor had the Luftwaffe much to fear from the capital's anti-aircraft defenses.

In addition, the Germans had a secret weapon. Dubbed Knickebein ("crooked leg"), it consisted of two radio beams directed from stations in Europe. The bombers would fly along one beam and release their bombs when the first beam was interseceted by the second. Rashly, the Luftwaffe had tested Knickebein over England in March 1940, when they had no plans to mount a night bombing campaign against Britain. The examination of a crashed He 111 bomber enabled British scientists to unlock the secrets of Knickebein and start to develop countermeasures. By the autumn of 1940, when the Luftwaffe turned its attention to industrial centers in the Midlands, it had perfected a more sophisticated version of Knickebein, X-Verfahren ("X-system"), which employed four beams and a clockwork timer on board the aircraft that was linked to the beams and the bomb release. A crack unit, known as Kampfgruppe 100, was formed to act as pathfinders for the main bombing force, marking the target with incendiaries.

Late in the afternoon of 14 November, the British detected an X-beam crossing the Midlands. Less than two hours later the first Heinkel He 111s of KGr 100 arrived over Coventry to mark the target. They were followed by 449 bombers that devastated the center of the city and badly damaged a score of factories. Yet the city recovered quickly from its ordeal, and within days most of its factories were back in business.

Britain under pressure
Throughout January and February 1941 the Luftwaffe strove to maintain the pressure on London, the industrial Midlands, and Britain's western ports, the last link in the Atlantic supply chain. By now the air defenses had improved. In March night-fighters shot down 22 bombers and AA guns claimed 17 more. In May the fighters claimed 96 kills, the guns 32.

The final phase of The Blitz began on 16 April 1941, and reached a climax on 10 May with a raid on London that left one third of the capital's streets impassable and 1,400 civilians dead. But by now Hitler's strategic priorities had changed and the build-up to the invasion of the Soviet Union was gaining momentum. As a result, two thirds of the Luftwaffe were transferred to Eastern Europe.

Hitler's bombing campaign against Britain had failed. The Luftwaffe's principal weapon, the He 111, did not pack a big enough punch to bomb the British into surrender. Coventry had been targeted just once, and London's sheer size had saved it. Civilian morale had not crumbled - in the saying of the time, Britain could "take it."

Aftermath
Germany's bomber force did not return to attack Britain in comparable strength at any later stage in the war, while the British and Americans would retaliate in kind. The Blitz had caused human suffering and material damage but it had not destoryed civilian morale nor dealt a significant blow to Britain's war-making capacity. Bombing was about the only effective way Britain could strike back at Germany, and the government planned a huge expansion of the RAF Bomber Command. By 1943, Bomber Command would have Germany's cities in its sights. The nearest German equivalent to the massive Anglo-American bombing campaign were the unmanned V-weapons attacks on London in 1944-45.